What Brands Need To Know About Young China’s Surgery Boom via Jing Daily

Key Takeaways:

Beauty surgery has boomed in China over the past decade, as more and more beauty consumers feel pressure to conform to China’s rigid beauty standards.
Young China’s beauty ideals differ from the individuality of the West, prizing a “white, thin, teen-looking” aesthetic.
To create a more authentic connection with local consumers, brands must acknowledge the harsh societal standards that Chinese youngsters face and create ad-hoc narratives.

In 2012, after the actress Angelababy — who epitomizes China’s “web celebrity face” culture — was asked if she had ever gone through any surgery by Chinese media, her then-husband Xiaoming Huang immediately denied she had altered her appearance, insisting her beauty is 100-percent natural.

Back then, attempting to improve your looks through any surgical intervention was still widely considered a social taboo. As the Chinese proverb “everything given by your parents is sacred 身体发肤受之父母” states, any intent to alter your natural appearance is a breach of the Confucian filial piety because you shouldn’t see what your parents gave you as “not enough.”

But less than a decade later, plastic surgery has turned from a taboo to a collective craze among China’s younger generations. By 2019, China’s plastic surgery market had been growing at an annual average rate of 30 percent over the past four years — far above the global rate of 8.2 percent. Last year, 5,150 new medical aesthetics institutions opened in the country despite the pandemic, pushing China’s beauty surgery market size past $30.5 billion, which now accounts for 17 percent of the global share. According to the Medical Beauty Market Trends Insight Report, the market should exceed $46 billion by 2023.